It's perhaps a bit of a cliché to remind you of just how many marketing messages our clients are bombarded with every day.

In fact, I can't even remember the actual number. But it's thousands.

And more important than the number of marketing messages they see are the number of things they'd rather pay attention to than marketing: TV, radio, their friends on social media, their real friends, their family, sport, cooking – just tons of stuff.

Your marketing is waaaay down the priority list.

But if you want to win clients you have to compete with all that, because you need *attention*.

Unless you can grab your potential client's attention, they're not going to notice anything you try to get across to them.

No relationship building. No authority.  No nothing.

How do you grab someone's attention?

You could try being very loud and obnoxious.

It works, and it's a strategy some people use to good effect in their marketing with rants about how bad things are or how awful your life is and how you need their solution.

Not for me.

One strategy is to be entertaining.

We like entertainment. We pay attention to stuff that's interesting and different.

Remember when we used to say that the adverts were the best part of TV? Cadbury's Gorilla, The Smash Martians, You've been Tangoed.

Apologies for the UK specific references (you might want to look them up on youtube for a bit of fun if you don't know them).

Or you could try being useful. We pay attention to things that we can quickly see will be valuable to us.

You probably signed up to get my emails years ago because you saw me offer a free report or checklist of template that you thought would be useful to you.

Either that or the beard.

But probably the value I would guess.

Combine entertainment and value and you're on to a winner in the battle for attention.